Do bullies ever feel remorse?

[MotherOfOlafs]

Sorry if I’ve posted this in the wrong place as it is not lighthearted.
After reading today about yet another bright beautiful young teen having taken their life after relentless bullying I wondered if at any point the children who have bullied someone to the point of no return ever feel regret or remorse? Do they even realise that their actions may have potentially caused another child’s death? Are they taking some sort of sick pleasure from it? What do their parents think? Are they ashamed?
Apologies for the stream of consciousness, I just feel such sadness about it.

The thing is everyone is bullied at school
.

and everyone thinks that their bullying experience is worse than everyone else's

I remember a man going on and on to me about being bullied when he was at school..

And i said "I was bullied too".

And he glared at me and said "well it affects some people worse than others!"

Sorry, but that’s rubbish. A young teen with no SN will know perfectly well the difference between being nice, and being nasty. Or between being kind and being cruel.
Even much younger children will usually be well aware of the difference.

@theprincessthepea you just touched on something disturbing; how some people 'deserve' to be bullied, or they bring it on themselves.
Every now and then, I see this meme with Daniel LaRusso with the caption "you have to admit, he kinda deserved it" ( I admit I'm a karate kid and cobra Kai fan). NO ONE DESERVES TO BE BULLIED.

The question is should we judge teenagers like they are adults?

They are minors.

I was bullied at school by several girls, who would say hello to me in the street now. One of them was responsible for an incident where all my existing friends (people I’d known since I was a baby) completely stopped speaking to me. One of my friends now asked her about it years later and she doesn’t have any recollection at all of it even happening.

Last year I discovered one of the bullies was sleeping with the man I was dating, she of course denied it and laughed at me. So out comes 20+ years of frustration and I absolutely put her in her place. Damn it felt good.

If we had teenage children and they came in and said about each other,

"Sarah was mean to me. She took my clothes. She called me a name"

Would we judge them that harshly?

Teens always argue and fight with each other.

I think if you expect a school environment where teenagers will never argue with each other, or never be mean to each other,

you're being totally unrealistic

I did bully someone in school. I did think about it time and again afterwards and it probably sounds bad to admit that I don’t feel guilty about it but I feel bad for the person. They were incredibly difficult and unpleasant but looking back now I can see that they were were the product of their environment and never “escaped” it.

TBH the sort of behaviour you quote is not what I’d call actual bullying - the sort of sheer, deliberate nastiness I saw at school.

Some people/children are genetically hard wired to be bullies - affectionless psychopaths - for some it’s learned behaviour - either way they need to be 1) called out re unwanted unwarranted hurtful behaviours and 2) talking with positive adults/peers - 🙏🏽☘️👍

Weirdly enough, I've been bullied more as an adult than I ever was as a child. I think I was more resilient as a child and life hadn't thoroughly broken me yet. As I got older my defences were weakened by trauma after trauma and bullies could smell my vulnerability and use it to stamp all over me. So sad that older women will use ostracism and exclusion to bond their groups. I despise the line ' whatever doesn't kill you will make you stronger ', in my experience it should be ' whatever doesn't kill you will break you'.

My mum was an infamous bully at her school. She’s almost 60 and sometimes people she went to school with see her at the shops they spin on their heels and walk away from her like the fear is still there.

she feels deep shame over behaviour but represses a lot of it along with the rest of her trauma. It’s sad for everyone.

Perhaps they are not spinning on their heels because of the fear and it’s more a case of wanting nothing to do with her.
If your mum feels deep shame perhaps she should apologise to all those she bullied.
It might be better for everyone.

People generally never remember hurting others.

But they remember the hurt done to them

@Kjones27 I think people choose not to think about hurt they may have caused, rather than genuinely forgetting it. Real bullying i.e, a continuous effort by one or more people to physically or verbally abuse a target, sustained over time, is not something many are capable of doing. From reading this thread, though, it seems to me that there will be a few of these disturbed individuals in every year group. They are not just occasionally unkind but deliberately and persistently causing harm to the same individual(s) often over years. This isn't something that can be made into a generalisation about how people are, I don't believe. It's a sign of real disturbance in empathy, morality and normal development.

@Coshei When you say you don't feel guilty, is that because you think the person deserved whatever it was you did?

I wonder about this. I was bullied, and it severely damaged my life. Still does.
I also wonder if some of the Mumsnet bullies feel guilty later on? I've seen some absolutely shocking behaviour on here. Very obviously vulnerable people posting, and being pounced on by a tribe of grown women. Terrible, and definitely bullying.

At the time I did think that. I wouldn’t behave like this now but I also won’t ignore the circumstances at the time. He was insufferable.

I was bullied horrendously at school. She (Helen) spent three years following me, spitting at me, pulling my hair, making threats, putting me down, spreading rumours and trying to control. I felt unsafe and awful all day every day at school and I still feel sick thinking about my teenage years. She made my life a living hell and I never dared return to my home town after university. It’s affected my whole life.

I Google her from time to time. I was shocked to see some articles during Covid about the voluntary work she was doing with her own quote ‘I hold the hands of the dying’ as the headline. I couldn’t think of anything worse than having her hold my hand during a time of need.

I sometimes think about contacting her to let her know what she did to me. I sometimes wonder that, if she has changed, whether she ever contemplates reaching out to apologise to me.

I suffered from eating disorders and self harmed a lot to try and offset the pain I was going through. I’m just grateful that it was before the days of internet and mobile phones- if she’d been able to reach me in my own home I think I’d have completed suicide.

Why did you think it was incumbent upon you to punish him? Why did he affect your like other than to irritate you? I mean, why do you stand by that?

@Coshei I don't really know what you mean by insufferable, as it's quite vague, but I gather this person harassed or upset you in some way, and your response was a sustained campaign of abuse - if you really did bully them in the defined sense of the word. That's a slightly unusual variation of bullying, which usually has a more severe imbalance of power, with the bully targeting an individual in a much weaker position. However, it's hard to know if what you describe was actually bullying on your part, in my view.

As I said he was insufferable. He reported anyone to the head teacher for anything minor, and also made up obvious lies to get you into trouble. Things changed when the teachers realised and started to ignore him and he changed schools not long after.

@Chocolateroulade I'm very sorry for what you went through. I think wondering whether the bully felt remorse is so common. It's very hard to accept that someone can cause such hurt, sometimes a lifetime of hurt, and not know why. The reason you wonder is because you would never hurt someone in such a way yourself, so it's impossible to understand someone who would, I think.

Not to the extent of pushing someone to take their life. But I got in with the wrong crowd at school and tried to keep my status by being particularly horrible to one boy. He was new in out last year of school and for a couple months I just picked on him. Not physically bullying, but verbally.. I was just being a bitch.

I can remember going home one day and I don’t know if maybe I read an article about someone taking their life or something but it suddenly dawned on me that that’s what I’d become and I immediately stopped and apologies to him directly. We ended up becoming sort-of friends for a couple of years, we would just chat during the lessons we had together and on social media after schools/college ect.

I can’t even say I didn’t know better, I did really. I think I just thought what because my ‘friends’ were ‘billy big balls’ that I had to act like that too to stay relevant. It sounds so silly now. Especially now I have children too, as I don’t want them on either side of that pond. I’d be so disappointed if they became a bully, and heartbroken for them to be bullied.

That said, I know some adults in their 40’s/50’s that are relentless bullies, I’ve had managers that have been bullies too.. so I think some grow out of it and some don’t.

Thank you. Having someone acknowledge my pain is actually very comforting, I didn’t expect to feel that and I’m grateful. I don’t talk about what happened to me in real life, it’s far too painful, even 30 years later.

The question is should we judge teenagers like they are adults?

Absolutely.

Parents who bullied breed kids who bully - they are the product of their win environment and yes I judge and yes I tell my kids to stay away - because I would not stand for my kids being bullied or being bullies.

kids are cruel because their parents allow them to be.